Is there a Jewish equivalent of church bells or the Islamic call to prayer?

A friend doing some inter-faith liturgical planning wants to know. I don't remember anything like that, but might well have missed it on account of a) arriving at synagogue slightly after most services started and b) not really understanding Hebrew.

I need some help in the form of spare bodies to help with concert logistics on Friday. I'd need you to be there from about 6.30pm, just to be on the safe side, though the concert doesn't start until 8pm, because I need to warm up the choir and do a bit of rehearsing from 7pm so can't be helping with set-up after that point. I need two people to sit behind a desk and take money and/or tickets from people coming to the concert. I need one person to hand out programmes. Ideally I need one person to act as a general gopher so that if anything goes wrong with those first three, it can be solved. Two of you need to sort out tea and coffee at teh break: this will involve putting teabags in a metal teapot and filling it from the urn, pouring the tea, and general hovering and being useful and making sure nothing spills.

It would be great to have a couple of people willing to stay after the concert and help with the tidying and washing-up, too.

For obvious reasons, this can't really be done by people who are in the choir.

You get to attend the concert for free, and you will have my adoration and thanks. And a pint afterward or at a later date.

Made this yesterday. It is tasty. Recording recipe for later reference.

beetroot (cooked)sliced appledill (could also use fennel or maybe even celery or coriander)lamb's lettuce (but could use most greens; chickweed would be nice)white crumbly cheese (used Lancashire; Wensleydale would also work, a good feta would be delightful; some blue cheeses might also be good but I tend not to like them)

Chop appropriately and mix together. Pretty pink and green! You can eat it as it is, really. Or you could add:

Cut-and-pasted from a Facebook message. The woman doing this is someone I met when I was 12 and remained penfriends with for some time before losing track of her and then finding her again through Faceborg; she is brilliant and wonderful.

Goal: Raise $2,000 and see how money grows on trees!

We created Noonkodin School from scratch five years ago, out of a patch of bush land in the mountains of northern Tanzania. Now our first class of 26 students, most of them from low-income Maasai pastoralist families, has just graduated from Form 4 (the equivalent of GCSE). None of this would have been possible without the sacrifices made by hundreds of individuals all around the world who sponsor students, make donations for buildings or equipment, and support our special appeals. If you're among them, thanks so much for your valued support, and please forgive us for making yet another appeal to you! If you're a newcomer to the school, we hope you'll consider making a contribution, however small.

To secure the school's long-term future and reduce the risk that the global credit crunch and a resulting drop in donations will eventually force it to close down, cutting off the only possibility of a high school education for dozens of disadvantaged Tanzanian youth, we now want to take some important steps towards sustainability. Setting up an organic farm will enable the school to grow its own food; rainwater harvesting tanks will help it to become self-sufficient in water, in an area where the nearest potable water source is a 4-hour walk away; and keeping dairy cows will enable us to produce enough methane to run a specially designed biogas cooker, eliminating the need for firewood.

The first step is deceptively simple. Planting the thorny, drought-resistant shrub Jatropha curcas as a living fence around the school compound will keep livestock out of the school grounds, making it feasible for us to start crop trials without the young plants getting munched. But that's not all. The seeds of the Jatropha plant yield a viscous oil that can be used as a substitute for diesel to power generators, machinery and even vehicles. It can be converted, through a very simple process that our chemistry students will be able to perform in their own lab, to a medicinal soap that has anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties. (We still need to equip the lab too - but that's another story!)

We are aiming to raise at least $2,000 to plant enough Jatropha saplings to create a living fence all the way around the school grounds, and to purchase a hand-operated oil press. Please consider donating $20 for two saplings, $40 for five, or whatever you can afford. The saplings would make a great Christmas present for the friend or relative who has everything!

We guarantee that ALL money donated to Serian UK is sent out to the projects in Tanzania, and since its establishment in April 2005, the charity has not spent a penny on administration (other than bank charges). We can prove this through audited accounts that have been submitted to the Charity Commission. The Trustees have covered all transport and postage expenses out of their own pockets, and photocopying has been provided for free by a school in Southampton.

If you are in the US or Canada please donate via the Facebook website to ICSEE, a 501(c)3 registered nonprofit, which has been supporting Noonkodin through a formal partnership agreement since 2006.

We also have a partner charity in Australia, St Brigid's Charity, set up by the headmistress of St Brigid's Primary School in Nerang, Queensland to raise funds for Maasai girls at the school who had run away from home to escape from female genital mutilation and forced marriage. Please e-mail me if you would like further information and contact details.

midnightmelody posted about this. I have copied and pasted the next section of this post from her.

----------------From 5th-7th December 2008 at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, London, we will be bringing together those who have direct experience and knowledge of social need – be that in education, health care or elsewhere - with those who have the technical skills to build web-based technology to address social challenges. Their mission will be to develop six ideas for digital tools that could create social change into working prototypes in under 48 hours. At the end of the weekend, we will be awarding prizes to the projects with most potential.

Anyone can enter our competition to get their idea developed at the Social Innovation Camp. You don't have to be technically-minded: it's all about great ideas addressing real need. We’re inviting those who have knowledge of education, health care, local communities or environmental issues to submit their ideas.

Take a look at the winning projects from the first Social Innovation Camp in April for some inspiration or you can watch the film of the event to see how it works.

Find out how to submit your idea here. You’ve got until Friday 7th November 2008 to enter for a chance to join 80 other participants who can help make your idea a reality at our 5th-7th December 2008 Camp.

Social Innovation Camp is a practical experiment in how technology can create social change, sponsored by NESTA and the Young Foundation. Find our more on our website here.------------

I probably can't go to some of this because of teaching on Sunday. And I have to think very carefully about my own workload for December and whether I can actually afford to add to it, even for such a shiny cause. But. Shiny!

My grandfather used to sing a song to me, about an old woman who had a little pig. I never heard it anywhere else and had difficulty finding it, and he didn't seem to be able to remember where and when he learned it. I asked family and friends a few times, and wondered about it every once in a while, but never got around to really tracking it down.

I just came across it in the course of doing some research for a singing-with-children event I'm helping with on Thursday. The tune is rather different and some of the verses are not quite the same as what I remember, but it is most definitely the same song.

"Now there's this about cynicism. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace." - from Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold

The new Prime Minister came into office in the middle of the hurricanes. One very real worry is that this will destabilise the government in a country that is always looking over its shoulder for fear of foreign intervention.

I've been thinking a lot the last few weeks about community and responsibility and effectiveness and improvement and interconnectedness. I've been thinking about how lucky I am that my two main career activities do actually involve making the world better, in some small way. I have also the privilege of working and playing with so many people who make the world better in a variety of different ways... and I'm not just talking about career stuff there, by a long way: people I know through social and family groups are pretty amazing, too.

I think it's very easy, though, to lose sight of what we do to improve the world, and to lose sight of what we would like to do. I think that in something this important, awareness is a good thing. So, some questions:

What do you currently do as a regular part of your life that improves the world? How does it work? What are you actually contributing?

What would you like to do to improve the world, that you don't currently participate/engage in?

Is there someone in your life, near or far, who inspires you to make improvements? What do they do that is so special? How has it affected you directly, and how has it affected you indirectly?

-Hot water seemed to work again last night. Still seems to work. I'm hopeful it will continue to do so.-Too many tabs, not enough time to read them all!-Today's technology wibble was the library computers at Trinty not letting anyone log in. I had work to do. I was not impressed. So I came home, where I have proceeded to, er, not get any work done.-Tonight I'll spend a quiet evening in, alternating tidying my entropy pit room with catching up on aforementioned tabs. -Going to bookshops when hungry is dangerous. When will I learn?-someone just dropped a cardboard moving box out of a 7th-floor window. -If you have small jam jars with lids, I want them. Please. Thanks.